Baldessari and subsisting on a conceptual sandwich
Genial, amiable assassins are the ones you need to watch out for. Give me a profligate boaster, a denizen of the underworld after midnight who strides like a colossus across high society ballrooms in tails until 11 pm. Even a womanizing philandering debauched self-compromised lothario with a killer aim. But the quiet ones who simply go about their work and slowly but surely collapse every bridge leading from your mind’s island’s shore – once they’ve gone and insinuated their ideas, it’s all over but the 10-count. The ones whose work awakens you in a start, so you are suddenly sitting ramrod straight in bed, wondering just how the magic trick was done.
Like Lukács, the great film theorist André Bazin was an advocate of artistic self-effacement before reality. The individual film shot was, for Bazin, a simple unit of mimesis that, linked together with others, produced longer mimetic sequences. The ontology of the film image, then, is inseparable from that of its model, nature; cinema is merely a recreation of the world in its own image. According to Bazin, the individual shot, inflected with the long take and deep focus to produce a foreground and background of the mise-en-scène in the same sharpness of focus, determines the film’s authenticity.
Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, on the other hand, saw the shot as incomplete in and of itself. Eisenstein (like Vsevolod Meyerhold and Brecht) deemed reality alone inadequate to the task of producing sufficient emotional impact (shock), so art’s job was to exaggerate and schematize it. Thus the jerky, stop-motion technique with which the marble lion in Potemkin, 1925, springs to life as a symbol of awakening proletarian consciousness draws attention to its own artifice, and acts as a synecdoche for the dialectical language of the film as a whole.
For Eisenstein, maximum shock was generated by cutting together two shots of dialectically opposite realities: for example, the mother holding the baby and climbing the Odessa Steps in Potemkin, shot from above, cut with the line of troops descending the steps, shot from below. The resulting synthesis—two tides and generations of class history in collision—is greater than the mere sum of parts, as if 1 + 1 suddenly equaled 6, 7, or 8. As Eisenstein explained, “In art it is not the absolute relationships that are decisive, but those arbitrary relationships within a system of images dictated by the particular work of art.”
There’s a sly logic, then, to the fact that the photographs that have found their way into Baldessari’s montages of the ’80s are film stills, culled primarily from Hollywood B-movies. These might serve as the quintessence of the frozen Bazinian mise-en-scène—except that Baldessari crops these images, fragments them, and juxtaposes them with other stills from other movies. Bazin, the paragon of realism, is literally “Eisensteined” here
Fame is a prison that strokes the ego of its prisoners and provides them with exceedingly comfortable lives. Being watched, assessed, evaluated, and measured is the price the famous pay – the work they perform – in consequence of the material comforts accorded them and adulation (however intermittent or ephemeral) that washes over them. Courting infamy to gain entrance to this prison is not a new method, though the means by which to do so have certainly proliferated.
The thing about the Hunger Artist (as compared to, e.g., the Hunger Games) is that its commitment to acknowledging the madeness of the text, even as it remains (on the surface at least) ceaselessly accountable to the commitments that are made in the text. By implication at least. And so the answer to how to eat a conceptual sandwich is either (1) very carefully, with appropriate garnishes; or (2) in one bite, with the aim of choking.